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Wait Wait& Donˇt Play Me: the Clicker Game Genre and Configuring InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities Oscar Moralde1 1UCLA Published on: Apr 18, 2019 DOI: 10.47761/494a02f6.0cf44974 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities Clicker Heroes, 2014. "We do not say that we have learnt, and that anything is made new or beautiful by mere lapses of time; for we regard time itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges whatever it affects from its present state."1 “The Time Machine brings cookies from the past, before they were even eaten.”2 Game Genre, Duration, and the Flow of the Everyday Video game aesthetics extend beyond the sights and sounds encoded into datasets for electronic processing into the audiovisual worlds of player experience. They even extend beyond the feel and feelings produced by the cybernetic intersubjective assemblage of player and game at the threshold of the interface, which has become an important site of inquiry for game studies scholars.3 Game aesthetics are strongly situated aesthetics: spatial and temporal contexts not only shape the meanings that players take away from gameplay experience, but they also determine the form and types of experience that unfold in play. For example, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray describes the iconic 1984 puzzle game Tetris as “a perfect enactment of the 2 InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s—of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught… Tetris allows us to symbolically experience agency over our lives.”4 This passage has been cited as a historical flashpoint for the so-called ludology-narratology debates and on related questions of the value of symptomatic readings of video games as texts—whether the audiovisual and gameplay elements that constitute Tetris signify a coherent critique, the importance of elaborating that critique, and other similar questions.5 However, the profound insight that Murray offers with this example is not solely contained in what Tetris is, but in delineating how, where, and when Tetris might be played. Her reading of the game does not assume an idealized abstract concept of a player but a specific playing subject: in this case, a worker inhabiting an ever- accelerating regime of labor that places increasing demands on the subject’s time and attention. This specific configuration of everyday life is the ground against which Murray examines the game’s qualities; those qualities, because of how they use and shape time, make a good fit (so to speak) for such a life. The core gameplay “loop” of Tetris, which involves placing a series of blocks into proper places in order to clear lines of blocks off the board until the accelerating inputs clutter the board too quickly and end the game, does more than evoke the feeling of task management through its assembly-line game mechanics. Those relatively straightforward mechanics also work well in short play sessions of a few minutes where the player starts from scratch each time. Thus, the mechanics not only resemble task management, but also cohere into experiences that fit into the gaps of a player’s everyday schedule of real-life tasks; the game itself takes on the temporality of a task by structuring and capturing otherwise unordered time. Murray’s insight, which links gameplay experience to everyday life, raises a key question for video game aesthetics: how do specific game design choices and gameplay forms address everyday temporalities? What kinds of lived experience do games envision, and how do they fit into that experience? The aesthetics of duration (along with intermittence and repetition) within specific reception contexts is not unique to video games; investigations into the mode of binge- watching television series on streaming platforms, or the durational experience of slow cinema within theatrical and museum contexts, address similar questions about how formal-aesthetic properties of a work shape how it fits into one’s lifeworld.6 What is arguably specific to games, however, is how duration binds to questions of genre and the expectations that players have about game genre; these questions tie to the 3 InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities protean status of game genre classification in general. For example, in cinema studies Steve Neale suggests genre as a relational process between audience expectations and an historicized corpus of films dominated by specific aesthetic strategies such as spectacle, and Linda Williams has written of the embodied reactions that are implicated in classifying genres such as horror, pornography, and melodrama.7 Yet, these concerns remain relatively agnostic about duration and are portable across short films, two-hour features, and long-form series—slow cinema as a quasi-genre category derives some uniqueness from its inordinate reliance on duration compared to most genre classifications. In the study of game genre, the relationship between audience expectations, dominant aesthetic strategies, and embodied reactions remains critical, but is further complicated by frameworks of player experience. Thomas H. Apperley has criticized conventional and popular genre categories for relying on “loose aesthetic clusters based around video games’ aesthetic linkages to prior media forms,” while Dominic Arsenault advocates discarding static genre models by noting that “the genre of a game is tied not to an isolated, abstracted checklist of features, but to the phenomenological, pragmatic deployment of actions through the gameplay experience.”8 Such a deployment of action for a given genre is strongly tied to the experience of duration. An abstract dexterity-based puzzle game like Tetris is usually experienced through discrete self-contained minutes-long play sessions, while a competitive fighting game such as Street Fighter V (2016) might segment into even quicker bouts of 99 seconds. Call of Duty (2003) and other contemporary first-person shooter games have single-player campaigns of about six to eight hours, while a role- playing game such as The Witcher 3 (2015) can last for dozens or even hundreds of hours of play. While there are certainly experiments and innovations in each genre that defy these expectations, both Neale and Arsenault note that genre hybrids and outliers rely on intuitive understandings of the genre’s conventions to distinguish themselves.9 If some of these conventions attend to duration, then identifying or creating a new game genre also creates new possibilities for understanding temporal experience. Game studies scholars have long been fascinated with the fragmented, amorphous, elastic, and recursive nature of game time that is built into the disjunction between human and computer temporalities, and the myriad forms of temporal manipulation that include pauses, save states, slow motion, replays, and rewinding. In Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games, Christopher Hanson astutely analyzes and synthesizes a wide range of theoretical models of video game time “to argue that what 4 InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities fundamentally differentiates the temporal structures of video games from other media is their unique engagement with liveness, causality, potentiality, and lived experience.”10 While Hanson primarily focuses on aesthetic strategies and mechanisms within games that structure the navigation and experience of temporality, he gestures toward the connection between games and broader considerations of lived time in a brief consideration of mobile games, writing in his conclusion: “The ways in that mobile games have become part of the daily lives of millions of people demonstrates the surprising and pervasive manner that game time has become part of lived experience.”11 That is, players actively place the experience of a specific game into the larger temporal context of everyday life. Building from that discussion, I examine that ever-changing placement through the lens of a young game genre that plays on the tension between player-game temporalities: the clicker game, also known as the idle game, the incremental game, or the background game. The clicker exemplifies Murray’s vision of endless multitasking- as-game, updated and accelerated for the technocultural landscape of the 2010s. In its fragmentation and intermingling of temporalities, it both dramatizes and enacts a technocratic regime of time-sharing that is endemic to contemporary neoliberalism’s colonization of ever more granular units of time. In its aesthetic ambiguity, the clicker genre is symptomatic of the absolute conflation of time and monetary value, yet also allows for the possibility of contemplating and experiencing resistance to that process —to find some time of one’s own. However, fully explicating the significance of clicker aesthetics requires contextualizing the genre within the cultural spaces of social media and mobile games, the structures of its gameplay mechanics and themes, and the technical capabilities of the hardware platforms it inhabits. Rise of the Clicker Genre and Waiting-as-Gameplay In 2015, game critic Jeff Gerstmann offered one provisional definition of the clicker genre based on its mechanics: These are games where you click on things to watch numbers go up, and eventually in many of these games you are able to hire things that effectively click for you. You are then earning more currency to spend on more hirelings that click on more things for you.
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